2008 and 2009 may be remembered as the years when the Western world finally remembered that the only real authority is moral. We've seen it in Wall Street's collapse and the torture of prisoners – and we've seen it in smaller things.

If you read a daily or weekly newspaper, you’ve probably noticed that our newspapers are getting smaller and thinner with each passing year.

Honk if you don’t know the difference between “hanker” and “hunker.”

This year for the holidays you might have gotten an iPod, some new gloves or a restaurant gift card. But if you were really lucky, you might have been gifted with Obama gear.

According to the Gregorian calendar, January is always a good excuse to start fresh or get started on something in general.

With the economy being what it is and with retail sales being what they are, more and more people are bargaining – for everything.

If 2008 was the year of bankruptcies and bailouts, I better declare mine before it’s too late. Not a financial bankruptcy. I need to declare media bankruptcy.

Just when I was ready to call it a slow news day, along came scandal-plagued Gov. Rod Blagojevich to appoint Roland “Opportunism First” Burris to Barack Obama’s old Senate seat. As my late grandmother Helena Sweeny would have said, “Land sakes alive!”

Are you singing “Auld Lang Syne”? Or “Another One Bites the Dust”?

Former New York Yankee great Joe Gordon was recently elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame and while I can’t testify to knowing a lot about his career; I can say that ol’ Joe was somewhat connected to our area. As an avid collector of vintage Minor League Baseball memorabilia, my path crossed with Joe Gordon’s a few years ago while browsing at a local Eastern Shore antique store.

The winners of the 2008 Thunk to the Head Awards give new meaning to the phrase “embarrassment of riches.”

Just when you’ve finally gotten your mind around the enormous $700 billion financial bailout — even if none of us is really sure where all that money’s going — there comes an even greater, breathtaking price tag.

Funny Thing ... 2008.

Let’s face it. If you’ve been rambling around Earth long enough to claim menopausal status, your stuff has been through some stuff.

New Year’s, as it turns out, is far more than a time for making a few unreasonable resolutions. This is when people all over the world -- and not all of them are drinking -- do unusual things for the sake of starting the new year off oddly, just because they always have done these things.